African American Struggle

The story of African immigration is unique among immigrant groups, just as the African experience in America has been exclusively essential to the course of American life.

Unlike other immigrants, most Africans came to North America against their will, caught up in a cruel system of human exploitation. The treatment we endured in the United States was of a harshness hardly ever surpassed in recent history, and their role in U.S. society was contested with a rage that nearly tore the nation apart.

The centuries-long battle African Americans waged for freedom, for dignity, and for full participation in American society completely transformed the nation, and shaped the world we live in today. Today, there is no aspect of life in the United States that has not been touched by the African American experience; there is no institution, custom, or daily practice that has not been influenced or remade by the efforts of African American thinkers, workers, artists, activists, and organizers.

African Americans faced every form of racism, prejudice, and segregation possible. We were not allowed to eat, drink, or even sleep in the same places with white people. They had everything marked whites or colors, and that was considered segregation. If an African American were to break one of those “rules” they would suffer great pain whether mentally or physically. When segregation came to an end, blacks were still not welcome to partake in the world comfortably. We were constantly going through life feeling like a slave although freedom was granted.

Affirmative Action, in the United States, was to overcome the effects of past discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women. The policy was implemented by federal agencies enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and two executive orders, which provided that government contractors and educational institutions receiving federal funds develop such programs. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act (1972) set up a commission to enforce plans. The establishment of racial quotas in the name of affirmative action brought charges of so-called reverse discrimination in the late 1970s. By the late '70s, however, flaws in the policy began to show up good intentions. Reverse discrimination became an issue, epitomized by the famous Bakke case in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a